The Other Universe
by firenze083
Summary: The sum of our choices. Five alternate realities if they’d each chosen something else. All characters.


1.) 

She almost says it, but Allison Cameron backs down at the last minute.

'A better parking space, a raise, and whiteboard privileges,' are her conditions for coming back to work.

House studies her face from the threshold of her apartment, and she tries her best not to squirm.

Finally, he nods. 'Done.'

She goes back to work on Monday, determined to ask him again. But there are too many things to do, too many people to save, and there is never a perfect time. (As perfect as her apartment door.) She tries, god, she does. She would stop him on his way out of the office, the clinic, playing his gameboy.

"House.' She would call, each time knowing she would say it.

'What?' 

And she likes to think that so does he, so does he, and maybe he would ask her first because there is always that hint of annoyance and brilliance and expectation in his eyes.

But she never does ('Nothing,' she would say, or 'Cuddy wants you to do your clinic hours, stupid things like that) and always, like the first time she doesn't ask him, tells herself that she'll do it sometime soon.

2)

'If you tell me everything he does, I'll guarantee you'll keep your job.'

Robert Chase's first answer is yes. He loves his job--needs his job, more than anything else, and with that came doing everything to save it. Even agreeing to spy for Edward Vogler.

But that week's episode of Grey's Anatomy flashed in his head. (We are a team, and you don't screw the team no matter what. No one knows who cut the LVAD wire.) He also thinks of House, and how much he's going to be royally pissed, and being on his good side actually helps make life easier.

'No,' He says instead and walks out the door, a little proud and dignified of his newfound sense of loyalty.

Two weeks later, House tells Vogler, 'Chase' because what it comes down to is Foreman is smarter and Cameron is prettier.

There is no time for regrets, and Cameron even hugs him, proud of what he did.

On his way out, he asks House why, and he looks up from his Gameboy long enough to tell him, 'You didn't love your job enough.'

3.)

Eric Foreman chops up oregano and tells his buddy Zach that it's weed. Easy money, he calls it, and pretty soon he saves enough so that when he gets out of jail, his father tells him, 'Why don't you use it to study?'

He allows mental images of himself in a white lab coat, working with the best doctors in a hospital. A glass hospital, he thinks quietly, because he has imagined this before, and the day that he sees a hospital made of glass walls is the day he'll delude himself that his dreams could have actually come true.

He buys beer and real weed instead, goes in and out of prison like changing clothes. When he is forty, he sobers up, moves to New Jersey and opens up a bar. He does not know that tomorrow, he will slice open his hand with one of his glasses, meet an arrogant son of a bitch of a doctor who will snap at him ('The freaking psych ward is upstairs!') because he is just standing there, staring at the glass walls.

But that is all for tomorrow. Tonight, he toasts his first customers, drunkenly playing poker at the far corner of his bar. It's not such a bad life, he tells himself happily.

4.)

James Wilson knows that the Rebecca Adler file has all the makings of an interesting case. Like all the interesting cases House let slide simply because 'I haven't made it to level sixteen yet!' He is not above lying--a white lie anyway, because saving another human's life trumps that anyway--and thinks fleetingly, maybe he could pretend to be her cousin.

But that thought flies out the window as fast as it comes. House would see right through. He does not give him the file. Or see him for lunch, for that matter. Sometimes, he gets tired of hearing about Stacy and Super Mario. 

Rebecca Adler dies, and so do a few other people, before Cuddy finally convinces him to take a case. Wilson stops going to lunch, or hanging out on his balcony, or thinking about lying about potential patients. Wilson stops.

Three years later, he hears from the nurses that House is arrested for possession of drugs. He hears his bail is a whopping fifteen grand, and idly wonders who'll bail him out.

5.)

Lisa Cuddy studies Gregory House's resume for a long time.

She should be seeing the prestige for her new hospital, dreaming about having the best diagnostic department in the country. But in her head, she sees instead the upturned faces of an entire auditorium class, her Biology professor, and the asshole in the muddy lacrosse uniform who was shouting out every discrepancy in her report.

Four administrators have fired him, and with good reason too, and for the first time, she does not see the world as it could be--only her career as it should be--and takes the easy way out.

His resume is in fine strips in the trash by morning.

For eight years she runs her precious hospital. Her diagnostic department closes and no praise for Princeton-Plainsboro makes it to the New England Medical Journal, but she gets nearly no lawsuits and everything is fine. A rich businessman invests a hundred million dollars and she welcomes it, and her hospital becomes a pharmaceutical.

Six months later, Edward Vogler asks her to step down, and she acquiesces. She has lost her passion long ago anyway, and what little she has gained, she can pack away in a box. 

Wilson politely asks her for (a pity) dinner and she politely declines, and they are both politely relieved.

She does look back the glass doors though, and thinks about what she could've done wrong, wonders what she missed.


End file.
